Re: what DOES the GPL really say?

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

<<Why doesn't somebody from ACT take part in the egcs project? So far,
egcs doesn't have anybody working on the Ada frontend to gcc.>>

We do not see any advantage to our customer base in doing so at the current
time. On the contrary, we would regard it as confusing to our customer
base to have two threads of development, especially if the egcs one is
rather uncontrolled, which seems to be the general idea.

If it were the case that various people were contributing useful
experimental stuff to GNAT, then that would be nice, and the egcs
project would be a reasonable home for such developments, but right
now that does not seem to be happening on any significant scale.

Our primary concern is to make sure that the continued development
of GNAT is very carefully controlled, with an emphasis on stability,
reliability, and robustness. This requires careful configuration
control, and careful testing. Note that one very significant missing
element in any work on GNAT in conjunction with egcs would be that
there would be no access to our test suite (the test suite cannot be
made public, since it is primarily made up of customer code, which
has to be very carefully protected).

We just don't see that the egcs project has much to offer in helping
the development of GNAT. Sure, we understand that people would like
to get their hands on changes early if their primary interest is in
fiddling with the latest stuff, but we don't see that as the market
that we are addressing!

P.S. GNAT 3.10p is now cut for at least one target, and we are doing
some pre-release testing right now, so far it looks pretty good, so
we are hoping for a 3.10p release pretty soon.